Looky, Daddy!

PostScript

2012-10-15T09:51:02-04:00

My wife has stopped calling me a good dad. That was the deal we made. She agreed to it back in 2009. "Quit your blog," she said over the sound of the laundry she was washing a second time because I had left it in the washer for three days. "Quit your blog and I'll make it up to you."

"Will you call me funny?" I had asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Will you say my words touched you?"

"Yes," she said again.

"Will you call me a good dad?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yes, I will call you a good dad, just like the people who read your blog and have never met you or seen you do a lick of parenting. You bet, Good Dad."

To be fair, she stuck with it a long time. To ease my transition away from blogging, I put little blank cards all over the house for her comments. On the dining room table: "That was such a great pot roast! Thanks for sharing!" In a basket of clean laundry: "Amazing! You must really love your family!" Next to the bed: "LOL." But it didn't last. And now it's like a taunt.

"You said you'd call me a good dad!" I wail constantly.

"Go start another blog," she yells back over the sound of the laundry she's washing a second time because I left it in the washer for three days.

So I am. You can find my new blog at brian-sargent.com. I'm not sure what it'll be, exactly, but I know one thing: It's going to make me look awesome.

Eating Crayons, Pooping Rainbows

2009-08-03T00:01:00-04:00

This is my last post for Looky, Daddy!

I've written this post many times over the past few months. I've written it like a guy composing a breakup speech to his girlfriend for no real defensible reason except that when he's not with her, he finds himself composing breakup speeches to her. Which is not a good sign, no matter how hot she is.

Blogs are incredibly time-consuming. Or at least they are if you spend thirty minutes writing a post and then two days obsessing over it: Reading the comments, rereading the comments, reading the post, wondering if you're still funny anymore, calling your mom to ask her what she thought of the post, scanning the Internet for blogs that say the post changed their life. It's the very definition of irony: Letting your kids watch TV so they won't bother you as you search the web for references of what a good dad you are. And don't even get me started about Twitter.

I've had more fun that possibly imaginable writing this blog. True fun. And most of that fun is because of you guys. Some of you I know, others of you I've met, but most of you I only know by your email addresses or the names you use to comment or your IP addresses because I copy those down and keep them in a database and why doesn't 70.111.15.13 visit the site anymore? Is she okay? Someone should drive by her house and make sure. You guys are the reason this site continued past its 30-day free trial, and I will, in all seriousness, miss the connection I have made with all of you, especially the ones who sent me all the coffee.

When I was a kid, I had a dog that ate crayons. He ate crayons and then pooped them out as rainbows, and that, to a large extent, is what I've tried to do here. I've tried to take the raw ingredients of childhood, digest them, and turn them into something colorful and shit-filled. In fact, if there were better words to carve onto Looky, Daddy!'s tombstone than "Colorful and Shit-Filled," I don't know what they would be. But this month marks my third year to do this, and to me, three years is a long time to fill the Internet with shit.

Not that I'm done pooping on the Interwebs. Not by a long shot. Probably. It's just that I'm done being a parenting blogger. I'm done being Looky, Daddy! which was a really poor choice for a blog name anyway, because while it looks fine in a header, it makes me sound like a pedophile during party introductions.

"So you're Looky Daddy?"

"Well, I write a blog, and that blog is called 'Looky, Daddy!'"

"Everyone, this is Looky Daddy."

I may as well have called the site "Windowless-Van Daddy."

Anyway, I don't do goodbyes well, and really this isn't a goodbye at all, except it really is. I will miss this. I will miss you.

Until we meet again.

Edited to Add: I would be lying if I did not say that your responses have not made me doubt my decision about 250 times since I posted this Monday. I mean, I've changed lives! I've healed the sick! I've made the lame walk again! Or at least I've made people laugh and cry, which, c'mon people, most of you have kids, and friggin' Hallmark commercials make people with kids laugh and cry. It's the hormones. Theirs, not yours.

I will be leaving the site up, untouched, for a while at least, though I'll warn anyone who goes too far into the archives, it gets pretty amateurish after a while. At some point, I'll probably break the blog down into a few "best of" posts (happy to take recommendations) and migrate it off to a host that won't charge me money for it. And I'll post here if and when I can be found elsewhere.

Again, and a thousand times again, thanks. This has been a lot of fun, and it wouldn't have been without you. Cheers,

Brian

There's Nothing Smart About Taking a Kid with Epilepsy to See Fireworks

2009-07-05T02:28:24-04:00

There's nothing smart about taking a kid with epilepsy to see fireworks.

So we do it.

We stay up hours past her bedtime and explode lights in her face, like participants in a demented researcher's clinical study. We load her up with sugar, too, going for broke.

It's not smart. We're not in this for smart. She can be smart when she has her own kids.

But I doubt she will.

When the show starts, when the classic rock cover band stops asking us to c'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon and touch them baby, when the explosions fill the sky, I watch her face. I look for eye rolls, for locked jaws. For tremors.

She watches the sky.

I watch her.

Her face is blue. Red. White. Sparkling.

When the big ones launch, she holds her breath. She holds it until the blast lights her face. Twice she reaches up, fluttering her fingers between her and the sparks.

We're close enough to the fireworks to smell them.

She never looks over at me. I rarely look away from her.

I've seen fireworks before.

I've never seen them like this before.

The finale comes, wave after wave of sound and light. She rocks up on her knees. There's no way this can be seen with mere sitting. It keeps going, flashing and pounding, blasts compressing the air between us and the sky. I watch her face.

She claps. Her eyes stay forward. The tremors never come.

There's nothing smart about taking a kid with epilepsy to see fireworks. There won't be next year either. But we're not in this for smart.

Wedding Lemonade

2009-06-29T01:21:39-04:00

Summer posts will be scarce. There's not much to be said about that. Last year I bravely promised a drink recipe a week just to keep you coming back, and I managed a whole five of those before summer drowned me in grass clippings and sunscreen. Let's see if I do better this time.

Wedding Lemonade.

I only tasted it once. It seared a memory into my 8-year-old brain even as it seared away the lining of my 8-year-old esophagus. For years to come, it reduced me to a kind of lemonade paranoia, asking with what must have been maddening constancy whether the pitcher of lemonade I saw in the fridge was "regular" or "wedding." Because to pour a glass of one thinking it was the other? Well, you know that startling feeling you get when you think you're sipping water but it turns out to be Sprite? This was thinking you're sipping lemonade and it turning out to be a mugging.

Lemonade and tequila. That's all it was. The lemonade was probably Countrytime because this was the late-seventies and recreational powders were just coming into style, but the tequila was definitely Two Fingers. I remember that name because my dad used to joke that the label read "two fingers" but it drank like a fist. As for the proportions, figure out just how much tequila you need to add to lemonade to cause blindness and stop just short of that.

My parents invented the drink at my aunt's wedding, and from that it got its name, but it hardly required another wedding for them to mix a pitcher of it again. In fact, I'm not sure if my parents ever attended another wedding after my aunt's. Make of that what you will.

My best friend from high school got married last week. It was a beautiful ceremony: Elegant and refined. They did not serve wedding lemonade. Throughout the ceremony, the groom, my friend Steven, grinned so incessantly I worried that when the time came to recite his vows, his jaw would simply unhinge and fall to the floor.

I do not want to co-opt their day for my own political and social agenda, except to ask them to treasure their marriage. Celebrate it. Honor it. Revel in it. Have an affair with it. Get drunk on it. Call it two-fingered but drink it like a fist. Because maybe if those of us who can marry did a better job of being married, there would be fewer people around who felt like marriage was something that needed defending.

Good Influence

2009-06-22T19:49:16-04:00

I wasn’t yet asleep when my dad came into my room and asked for my help. If he did this now, it wouldn’t be that surprising—a man in his sixties has a multitude of uses for a man in his thirties, even at just before midnight—but I was still in high school and I had no idea what could bring my dad to my room asking for help in the middle of the night. When he told me to get dressed and meet him in the driveway, I understood even less.

“And wear something dark,” he added as he walked out, leaving my bedroom door open.

During my youth, my father owned a number of cars, most of them earth-toned Volkswagon buses, and the one we owned at the time of this story was dark, nutty brown with lighter brown stripes going down the side. I’m guessing the stripes were put on as an afterthought once the Volkswagon dealer realized that even those who were inclined to purchase late-model VW buses might themselves balk at one that looked like a great boxy turd. It was in this bus two years earlier that I had demostrated to my dad my startling fluency in involuntary English expletives when one afternoon he undertook to teach me to how drive stick. It turns out an old VW bus is not a very good vehicle for learning to handle a standard transmission, but it is an excellent venue for finding out what curse words your sixteen-year-old son knows and how well he can work them into sentences. I expected to find my dad in the driveway next to the brown bus, but that’s not where he was. He was sitting in the cab of our pickup truck.

When you live out in the countryside of Texas, owning a pickup truck is inevitable. Ours was used sparingly, mainly for trips to the lumberyard or to haul junk to the junkyard. It was never used just before midnight on a hot summer evening.

“Get in.”

As we drove down the country roads between our house and our destination, my dad told me what we were doing. There was a plot of land he wanted to buy, he said, one he had had his eye on for a long time, waiting for the owner to put it on the market. Earlier that day, he said, the owner had finally done so, announcing the offer with a massive sign right in the middle of the land.

“It’s important that you understand,” my dad told me as we drove, “that I am going to buy the land. I’m going to buy all of it and I’m going to pay the amount that the seller is asking.” He looked over at me to see if I was following him, his bearded face lit in the glow of the truck’s dashboard. “You need to know that before we do what we are going to do.”

“And what are we going to do?” I asked.

“We’re going to knock down that sign with this pickup truck.”

********

The first hit was pitifully feeble. Neither my dad nor I knew how fast one should drive when one is ramming a billboard. The sign was huge, rooted into the ground by two round wooden posts. My dad had hoped we could drive the truck up to the sign and then push it over slowly, but the posts were dug too deeply into the ground for that, so we went with Plan 2. Which was ramming.

The truck headlights were off. My dad was driving. I was standing in the field, offering what guidance I could. We were both giggling like schoolgirls.

I do not know at what point our mission made the jump from sober undertaking to Jackass, probably about the time we both threw ourselves to the ground to avoid being seen by a passing car despite leaving the pickup truck running with its front end pressed against the base of the sign, but by the time we were backing up even further distances to build up even more speed, it was unclear whether we were both going to die from the impact with the sign or from laughter-induced asphyxiation.

When the sign finally cracked, it was almost disappointing. Both posts cracked at the base at once, tilting the sign down at an angle. After that, we didn’t so much ram the sign as drive the truck up the slope of its posts, pushing it down the rest of the way. Then we loaded the sign as best we could into the back of the truck and drove away, not turning on our headlights until we were down the road a bit because we’re sneaky like that.

Driving the country roads back to our house, the sign hanging more out of the truck bed than in, my dad used his handkerchief to wipe the tears from his eyes and admitted that, upon reflection, there were probably better tools available for taking down that sign than a pickup. It was, after all, made of wood, and try as he might, he could not recall vehicular collisions as one of the major methods for cutting wood.

“I hear axes are good,” I put forward. “Or chainsaws.”

My father nodded and agreed that those did sound reasonable and that, if ever we decided to make a habit of this kind of thing, we should invest in just such tools.

“We could even buy one of those two-handled saws,” I said. “We’d be outlaw lumberjacks.”

My dad smiled at the thought, and so did I. I’m not sure if his cheeks hurt as much as mine did, but I’m guessing they did.

Happy Father’s Day, Outlaw Lumberjack.

You Wish You Knew How to Quit Me

2009-06-19T07:36:20-04:00

I shared how the twins got their names over on nameberry today. Don't click if you named your kids Hester.

Side Effects

2009-06-17T09:55:54-04:00

So apparently, when your child's behavior is controlled by anti-seizure meds, you're not supposed to yell at her for it. Which sucks. As a general rule, my parenting style is pretty straight forward: Misbehavior met with swift retribution. I learned it from God. But now I'm being asked by paid professionals to greet Kathryn's uncontrolled bursts of anger with "understanding" and "redirecting," even though the only thing I can think of to redirect her toward is the television and the reminder that the cable that came free with our house probably won't be free much longer.

On Saturday, Kathryn asked if we would paint her room blue. I don't blame her for asking. Right now her room is pink. We didn't paint it pink; it came that way. Just like the bathroom came pink-ish. I try not to think about it too much. Still, nobody had planned to keep Kathryn's room pink for the past year and a half, least of all Kathryn, but since the room is not a Webkinz, Kathryn kept forgetting to talk about it with us. Until Saturday, that is, when she said she wanted it painted blue.

She wasn't angry when she made her request, which caught my attention, but I told her no anyway since I like to stick with what I know. Kathryn didn't ask again, but the rest of the day, Kathryn kept coming out with these bizarre statements, like "I need a snack because I saw orange," or "I'm hyper because of my red shirt," and it didn't take more than 73 of those before I figured out what was going on: Some hippie must have gone to her school and given the colors-and-feelings speech. Damn hippies.

"Kathryn," I asked in a quiet moment, and by quiet I mean the ten minutes between ice cream trucks passing outside, "why do you want to paint your room blue?"

"Because blue makes you calm." Kathryn looked at me. "I thought maybe if my room was blue, I might not get angry so much." She batted her eyelashes exactly once.

You might be thinking at this point that I'm a good dad, trying to do what little is in my power to give Kathryn some more control over her wild emotions, but the way I figure it, I'm just a second coat away from getting to yell again.

More on Rocks and Words

2009-06-04T15:21:16-04:00

Something that I left out of my post two days ago, the one about rocks, Kathryn, and the words she contains, is that all that talking I did to her made her a genius.

Once, as a three-year-old, she came to me with a question. She asked me why half of our front yard was wet and half of it was dry. Before I could answer, she said, "Is it because the wet part is in the shade and the dry part is in the sun?" and then "and the sun made the water warm and it turned into a vapor and it went up to the sky?"

I don't talk to the twins. Unlike Kathryn, they were born into a different time. With Kathryn, I talked to retain my sanity. Now, the only thing that has any hope of preserving what sanity I have left is silence. So for four years, the twins have been left to fend for themselves.

Which is why, the day after Kathryn collected so many rocks and put them on our porch a few months ago, the twins went to each other for an explanation:

"Where did all these rocks come from?" one asked. Don't ask me who it was. I still can't tell them apart and at this point it's kind of embarrassing to ask.

"Well," said the other, thinking it over. "Sometimes it just rains rocks."

"Oh yeah. Sometimes it does."

I think I need to talk to the twins more.